


Who Is Left

by zambla



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Gen, History, Lost Years, Nazi Occupation, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-19
Updated: 2015-03-19
Packaged: 2018-03-18 13:55:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3572123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/zambla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tom Riddle was only eighteen when the voice of Churchill announces the 'cease fire' over the air waves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Who Is Left

**Author's Note:**

> Meant to be the prologue for a longer story about Tom Riddle's rise to power in his "lost years", but that might not happen any time soon, so here it is, a bit of a teaser.

_ War does not determine who is right - only who is left. _

\- Bertrand Russell.

 

If they look back later, and even if they looked carefully, they would probably still miss these things.  
  
Early in the summer of 1944, the remaining few prisoners awaiting deportation to Auschwitz or Mauthausen in the Drancy camps, near Paris, die from what could only be magical experimentation, though unnoticed by anyone. Tom Riddle is seventeen. Wandering by day through occupied Paris he smokes black market Gauloises and reads anything and everything he finds. In a back alley outside Gare du Nord a man is selling books off of a sheet on the ground. Fifty ration tickets for the Stendhal, a hundred-fifty for the translated complete Shakespeare, mere ten for the Döblin: he’s banned, Jew, bad business. He chats with _les soldats allemands_ in cafes in his beautiful French and feigned broken German. Grindelwald, the old threat in the east, is terrorizing Wizarding Europe. The Muggle war had just come to a head in June. In August Tom Riddle watches the Liberation Army from a roof on Bd. St Germain, and goes back to London to board the Hogwarts Express, miraculously still running in the rain of V-1s.  
  
A year later, in May, Tom Riddle fiddles with the radio in his dorm room—conjured from scrap plastic and transistors he transformed from base metals. He extends its range through a complex frequency-specific amplification spell. In his sound-proofed four-poster bed in the Slytherin dungeons, the patrician Churchill voice rings out in its even, sonorous monotone: but in the interest of saving lives the ‘cease fire’ began yesterday to be sounded all along the front—  
  
In 1947, an eminent Greek scholar of Parseltongue goes missing while hiking alone in the Valbonë Valley, after hearing rumors of strangely overactive snakes coming out of hibernation still in winter time. For a fortnight the search party combs the forest, but his family cannot recover any trace of his body. Ghost sightings begin to surface, of a middle-aged balding man shuffling in the woods, looking for something.  
  
In 1948 he shows up in Jerusalem amid the fighting and watches from the sidelines. Apparating into the olive-treed desert he tracks down the ancient magical communities that live scattered in northern Galilee and amongst the Bedouins, who avoid contact with others in the world. Tom Riddle learns more about souls. A village disappears.  
  
He follows massacre, war, and famine. His appearance seems to change at will—a solemn rebel band-leader in the DSE in Greece, peripherally advisory to Vafiadis—a conscientious defector to East Germany in late ‘49, his expansive knowledge of nuclear physics as important to his handlers as his magically obtained NATO code intels—a mysterious journalist with no pen and no paper—a beggar—a man a cloak a smoking wand—  
  
He acts out the different scenarios in his head—a charmed dictator, in the old colonial strongholds perhaps, or a bureaucratic party leader working eventually to Chairman of Council of Ministers in Moscow, or heading up a coup d’etat, storming the Ministry then seizing the Parliament, and after his impassioned, Cromwellian speech, making the MPs march out single file into the bright Thames sunlight.  
  
He needs to study power. He needs to find the how, how to bind and unbind souls to bodies, societies to people, power to himself.


End file.
